‘Florence Nightingale’ nurses helping Ray, and Neptune nice tonic too, but noisy ward no fun

Lying in hospital with a tube down his nose and another in his arm wasn’t where trainer Ray Green expected to be when Neptune won his first race.

And Green admits that, while he enjoyed being able to watch the promising colt score last night on his specially rigged laptop at Middlemore, all he really wanted to do was go to sleep.

Green may be out of the intensive care unit, after being kicked in the stomach by a horse on Monday, “and being cared for by some lovely Florence Nightingale nurses” but he’s finding the ward very noisy.

Still in pain and eating only yoghurt, it will be a few days yet before he is well enough to go home, and the prospect of a long rehabilitation doesn’t sit well with the active 77-year-old.

“But I’ll just do the best I can and we’ll see what happens.”

Green knows that at his age he’ll have to be patient but it’s a virtue that he’s long used in his education of young horses and one which has certainly paid dividends with the showy Neptune.

“All his family have got better with a bit of age and he’s a lot stronger now than he was when we gave him a few starts earlier in the year.”

In acknowledging Green’s patience, Lincoln Farms’ owner John Street revealed how Neptune was one of half a dozen youngsters they’d waited for, and who would soon be hitting the track.

In his first race back last night, Neptune showed real talent as he overcame being held up early in the run home to win untested, driver Zachary Butcher saying he’d been very easy on the colt in the run to the line.

The rap was exciting news for part-owner Phil Kelly, who talked Street and his business manager Ian Middleton into letting him take 10% of the horse.

“I’d been eyeing him up months,” said Kelly who was taken by the colt’s swagger.

“Whenever I looked at him, with his ears pricked, I got the impression he was thinking ‘I’m a smart bastard’. He looks like he’s got a bit of class about him.”

Kelly is no stranger to racing a good horse. He had a share in the former fine trotter Paramount King who numbered an Interdominion heat at Auckland among his eight wins.

One of Kelly’s partners in the horse was ATC steward David Turner who introduced him to the incredibly generous partnerships run by Street and his wife Lynne at Lincoln Farms.

Kelly races Neptune with the Streets and Glenn and Ann Cotterill and is hoping the son of Bettor’s Delight and eight-race winner Safedra shapes up as well as her four previous fillies Buzinga, Dr Susan, La Rosa and Allegra.